Logical Pluralism, Inference to the Best Explanation, and Bayesianism
In recent years, philosophers have struggled to understand the relationship between Bayesian and Explanationist logics. Proposed accounts disagree on many issues, but they all share a common presumption of logical monism—roughly the idea that there is exactly one correct logic. In this talk, Jonah Schupbach investigates the prospects for instead offering a pluralist account of Bayesianism and Explanationism. Logical pluralism allows that there could be more than one correct logic, and so varieties of pluralism may be distinguished by the salient notion of “correctness” that they employ. Schupbach distinguishes two possible varieties, which he dubs "descriptive pluralism" and "normative pluralism". He appeals to recent experimental work on the psychology of human learning and “updating” in order to motivate and support descriptive pluralism, and defends normative pluralism by exploring the implications of ongoing work using computer simulations to gauge Inference to the Best Explanation's reliability.
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